Book review: Fact and fiction intermingle, but this elegant novel is more than memoir

Irish Examiner

2 days ago

In novels such as Peerless Flats, The Wild, and her 1992 debut, Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud trod a fine line between fact and fiction, sifting and rearranging the events of her childhood in search of hidden truths.
She's at it again in My Sister and Other Lovers, as Bea and Lucy, the protagonists of her first novel, negotiate their teenage years.
Esther and her sister Bella are the children of Lucian Freud and Bernadine Coverley, an Irish Catholic Londoner who met the great painter when he was almost 40, and she was still in her teens.
After the couple separated, Bernadine, determined not to be ordinary, took her two young daughters on an epic trek across Spain and North Africa, their travails inspiring the novel Hideous Kinky, and a subsequent film.
Lucy narrates that story, and this: now 14, she and her older sister are on the road again after their mother's latest relationship hits the skids.
At the start of the novel they board ship for Ireland, and meet their grandparents, whom Lucy describes tenderly.
'Nana had a silk scarf wrapped around her hair and her lipstick made a bright red bow. Grandpa was dressed as I'd only seen him dress for Mass. His farm jacket and wellingtons discarded, he wore pressed trousers and a short beige coat. His beard was trimmed, his bald head shiny. He looked small without his work.'
They travel from Wexford to Kerry, but their mother has bad memories of the old country, and soon whisks them back to Blighty, where the sisters endure life in a series of communal squats and cheap flats.
And when Bea goes to college, Lucy is left to negotiate alone the perils of teenage life, from boys and alcohol (getting drunk, she explains, was like 'being in a soup') to an unwanted pregnancy she is determined to categorise as a mistake.
Bea, a little too like her father perhaps, runs towards danger, moving to Florence to live with a man 30 years her senior, a controlling drug addict who introduces her to the soporific delights of opium.
It's 'hardly a drug at all', she tells her sister, and 'not, in fact, addictive'.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be, and Lucy, meanwhile, faces 'the quandary of the younger sister — what to do when it had already been done.'
She will do plenty, in the company of unreliable men, and only later does she come to the realisation that 'with everyone I'd been involved with, I'd known, from the start, how it would end. They'd leave me. Or I'd leave them.'
The girls' mother is wonderfully drawn: wilful and somewhat chaotic, she is never cold. When she and Bea see a therapist together, it soon descends into a slanging match.
'The next day she called,' Bea tells Lucy.
''Sorry that you feel this way.' I told her to fuck off. Twenty minutes later I called back. 'If you can't tell your mother to fuck off,' she said, who can you tell?''
But the book's primary relationship is that between the two sisters, who might spend large parts of the novel in different countries but somehow manage to stay almost psychically attached.
'I texted Bea from the bus,' Lucy says. 'Sorry for trying to cheer you up your whole life. It has been quite annoying, she came back.'
As adults, they find their mercurial father less absent: while Lucy is in New York, he phones to tell her that he misses her.
'He hates anyone to be away … London for him is the safest place to be. Afterwards I had a thought: catching hold of my father's love is the biggest achievement of my life.'
It's tempting, of course, to read it all as biography, titillating insights into the unconventional lives of a great painter and his gifted, wayward daughters.
But that would be to reduce an elegant and elusive novel to mere memoir: better to read it as a story, and accept it for what it is.